Bliss, Guilt, and Weaving

I did it again...I took time away from the family for my own relaxation and renewal! It was fabulous, but also punctuated here and there with feelings of guilt...Leaving my poor sweet friend with my three terrors as well as her own two kids for five hours, only to hear (in a text that didn't reach me until after I regained cell service on the way home) that Kyan had been playing with knives in the kitchen and scared the bejesus out of her. Then there was this nagging feeling that maybe the reason Kyan has been acting out lately is the recent increase of time I am taking for myself...to which my dear friend (who was joining me for said relaxation and renewal) promptly replied that I was being ludicrous...I hope she's right.

The bottom line is that parenting is hard and we need to take space now and then. I hate to say it for fear of offending working parents everywhere (keep in mind that I once was one!), but that time away from home when other parents go to work is a blessing that sometimes goes unrecognized. I have mornings where I seriously want to run after Ben's car as it pulls out of the driveway and scream, "TAKE ME WITH YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!" It's not that I don't love being home with the boys, trust me, I thank the stars everyday that I am not juggling teaching full time with mothering three boys. The problem is that if I don't take time away from them then I don't cherish my time with them nearly as much. I don't "get off of work" at any point during the day (or the night for that matter), so I need to take some scheduled mental health breaks!

So I set the intention to take some space for myself...I am taking a writing workshop that meets each week and doing a few other day long workshops. I have a book club that meets once a month and actually talks about the book we read (there may also be wine involved). I took two days and nights to go back to Breitenbush and sit around in hot water all day and eat amazing vegetarian food. I even went out one night not long ago to see my beautiful friend sing...It was crazy to be "out" again and of course I stayed out a bit too late and had to pay for it in the world of motherdom the next day, but it was worth it!

I truly believe that taking this time to myself brings me clarity and I am much more grounded in my ability to mother my children...well, at least to mother them well. It is much easier to take this time now that I am home with them everyday. I know that when I was working I felt nothing but guilt when I did things for myself, so I just stopped doing them. Sometimes I want to laugh when I look back at those days and remember how difficult I thought it all was...but, it was...I guess difficult is what difficult is when you are in that moment. Right now I have reached difficult on a whole new level.

Twins are hard. I guess most people wouldn't dispute that fact, so I won't bother defending myself with a paragraph long dissertation about why twins are hard, but I feel the need to acknowledge that they Are. Really. Hard.  They are also amazing. I suppose that is the guilty critic in my head that is apologizing for admitting that I am not a supermom who flies through my days wondering how other people can complain about the difficulty of raising children...I wish I was that mom, but I'm not. They are amazing...AND...amazingly hard.

So, I spent some time soaking and talking and soaking and eating and talking and soaking and talking and eating and sleeping and eating and soaking...and, it was fabulous. I experienced that strange reality where people see me as myself rather than the frenzied mother chasing her three children around various places. It was neat, but it also felt a bit wrong. I felt like I was telling people about my boys whenever I got the chance because then there were people there who could actually see me as who I really am. I am me...that person in and of myself...but, within that person is that frenzied mother and she cannot truly be separated from myself. I suppose that's the point, isn't it? No matter what we do or where we are we will always be both of those people. We cannot go back to a time when we were not mothers and BE that person again. There is a cord that binds us tightly to our mothering self and no matter how far away we may attempt to stray, it will hold us tight. That is easier for me to envision; what's difficult for me to envision is that the opposite is true as well: That self, the one before the kids that we see as just us without the mother self, that self is always there, too. We are also bound to that person and that person is bound to us. Writing reminds me of that. When I write I hear her voice, I feel her pain and her joy, I become her and I weave her in and out of my mothering self.

This is where I think I am going with the intentions I have set for myself. I am attempting to tighten that weave so that I can feel the entirety of myself in everything that I do. If I can weave a big beautiful blanket then perhaps I can hold it tight around myself when I begin to lose my way...

Time Out of Mind

Where has the time gone?

Well, it certainly hasn't been directed at my blog, I'll tell you that much. It is something of a mystery to me that I can look at something I enjoy doing so much (writing) as a chore and ignore it for months on end. I tried to determine what it is that makes me do this and the best I can come up with is that I am so exhausted by being a mother that in the moments of free time that I find myself with throughout the day my only desire is to do things that do not require thinking AT ALL.

Coming to this particular conclusion made me realize something else: the twins are going to be two in 3 short months and I am STILL stuck in survival mode. You know how people tell you that the first year is the hardest and they promise you'll get to sleep through the night eventually...? Yeah, well, Kyan taught me that the first year thing is a myth, but the twins have taken it to a new level:
We still do not sleep through the night. We have one child in bed with us for a minimum of two, but average of 5, hours a night. Our pediatrician actually told me that our family probably accounted for 10% of their business this winter. Ben and I sometimes forget to say hello to one another and don't realize it until the kids are in bed and we walk out of Kyan's room. In fact, Ben and I went on our first overnight date, since the twins were born, a couple of weeks ago. We had a great time, but on Sunday morning after waking up at 8 am (which felt unnaturally late to us) we weren't sure what to do with ourselves. We eventually found ourselves walking around downtown Portland with coffee in hand at 11 am and expressing how boring life is without kids. Ben finally said, "let's just go home. I kind of miss them."

I suppose this also illustrates how much we love our kids. They are so fun and crazy. Our house is a VERY loud, but never boring place to be. Kyan is growing into an incredibly hilarious little man. The other day at Costco he wanted to get another sample of something and I told him that the polite thing to do was to only take one. He REALLY wanted another one, so I told him he could ask the woman if it was okay. He walked up to her while I pretended not to be watching, but he couldn't spit it out. He finally came back to me and I realized that his shirt was backwards. I asked him why and he said, "I turned it around so she wouldn't recognize me." SERIOUSLY?! I was quite amused by his cleverness, though the woman giving out the samples seemed to think it was a tad bit naughty. Oh well...at least he's a clever naughty boy!

So from what I understand of parenthood so far it is a stunning combination of love, excitement, frustration, desperation, and futility. There is absolutely nothing like it in the world...although I did read a very good blog post comparing it to climbing Mt. Everest...It seems to me that, just as in life, we feel completely misunderstood by anyone who is not living the same reality that we are right this moment as parents. I had a woman tell me today that she thinks her situation is harder because her daughters are only a year apart and she thinks twins would be easier. Case in point. Any of my twin friends would understand how wrong it is to say that to a mother of twins.

I love being a mother. I love being a family. I am also learning to truly love and appreciate the moments that I take for myself outside of these things. Though, when I do take this time I feel sort of out of place in the normal kid-free world. I kind of want a sign on my chest that says "mother of three. taking a break.", so that I might attract others who are more like me. It's strange. Someday I am going to look back on this time and I am going to miss it terribly, yet I constantly dream of a time when all three of my boys will be more independent. Yet another lesson of motherhood...love it while you've got it. I think I'll focus on that one this week...